Tuesday, February 21, 2012

New Internet appliances don't meet all families' requirements

Admittedly, my
family is atypical. My three teen-agers and I all have our own PCs, all with a
shared high-speed Internet connection. Our house is wired, with the kind of
cable typically used in corporate offices.

But there's an
orphan on the network: my wife. She wants her own computer and she wants
nothing fancy. Give her e-mail, Internet, instant-messaging, maybe some music,
and she'll be happy. And give it to her in the kitchen, without tying up the
phone line.

Every bit the
computer novice, my wife is a typical candidate for an Internet appliance.

So why didn't she
take to Gateway's AOL Connected Touch Pad ($499)? Simple. Because she knows
enough to know what she wants.

First, she wants
to use HER e-mail account.

Unlike others in
the family, she's not particularly miffed that the Gateway machine restricts
her to America Online as her Internet access ramp. She could handle that, but
through the closed world of AOL and the Touch Pad's proprietary "instant
AOL" operating environment, she can't download and manage her e-mail.

Our family
certainly has no intention of abandoning its Internet service provider,
especially as we are fortunate to have a working Digital Subscriber Line (DSL)
connection.

The Touch Pad we
tested was only enabled for connecting via a built-in 56K modem. Gateway now
ships software that allows you to reach AOL over a broadband home network like
ours -- but you need to install that software on a different PC.

There's no
installing anything on the Touch Pad, which is presumably the industry's idea
of what an Internet appliance should be.

With its small
footprint, stylish chrome frame and wireless infrared keyboard, the Touch Pad
is an eye pleaser. It runs on the Linux operating system, its memory chores
divided between 128 megabytes of memory with no hard drive.

The stylus works
well on the 10-inch LCD screen, much better than than the keyboard-based
joystick contraption that serves as a mouse. The appliance is cleverly designed
to affix under a cabinet, and the speakers sound nice.

But ours is a
household that pipes music through its computers, and the demands on a kitchen
Internet appliance are not set by the woman of the house alone.

There are the
teen-agers, who had these requirements:

* Must be able to
store and play MP3 music files (the variety swapped on the Internet using
Napster but that can also be copied from a store-bought CD) and feature quality
speakers.

* Must have word
processing software that the kids can use to do homework while keeping their
mother company as she cooks dinner. A notepad application for leaving messages
would be okay; the Touch Pad has it. But we have a whiteboard and a chalkboard
on the wall. They're better for that.

So here's what
happened: Some time between Christmas and New Year's, about two weeks after it
arrived, the Gateway Touch Pad was banished from the kitchen.

A Sony Vaio C1
PictureBook replaced it.

The PictureBook is
one the first laptops offered on the U.S. market powered by Transmeta's
much-hyped Crusoe processor (600 Mhz), which is advertised as substantially
improving battery life over Intel processors.

The PictureBook
settled in on the end of the kitchen counter. We plugged it into the home
network and got instant Internet.

This Vaio is a
fun, feature-packed little machine:

It's got a
built-in digital camera and a 9-inch screen with excellent 1024 by 480 pixel
resolution. It comes loaded with software that grabs still images and short
videos -- and edits them -- and has a slot for Sony's proprietary memory
sticks.

All this in a
1-inch thin, 2.2-pound durable shell with a 12-gigabyte hard drive, Microsoft's
Windows Me operating system and a USB port as well as an i.Link (IEEE 1394) for
digital video transfer.

Bottom line: The
Gateway Touch Pad did not meet the family's basic criteria. Nor for that matter
do any of the competitors we've looked at: 3Com's Audrey, eMachines' MSN
Companion and Compaq's iPAQ.

The first
generation of Internet appliances are still a gawky lot.

The only
workable alternatives currently available -- if it's e-mail, instant messaging,
Internet and a digital jukebox that you want -- are compact notebooks like the
PictureBook. And they're far too expensive for a kitchen counter